starlitmourning

[starlitmourning]

[starlitmourning]

You're just a mammal. Let yourself act like it. Your brain needs enrichment. Your body needs rest. You feel hunger and grow hair. You need to pack bond with other sentient things so you don't become unsocialized and neurotic. You are biologically inclined to seek dopamine and become sick when chronically stressed. "Hedonism" is made up to place moral value on taking pleasure in sensory experiences. I am telling you that if you don't let yourself be a fucking mammal, as you were made, you will suffer and go insane. No grindset no diets no trying to be above your drive for connection. Pursue what makes you feel good and practice radial rejection of the constructs meant to turn you into a machine. You're a mammal.

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shoutout to everyone dealing with. thhe fucking difficulty

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I'm, above all else, a tangentgirl. always saying shit like "sidenote," "oh also," "by the way,"

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lost in the moss

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(through gritted teeth) sometimes what's good for your mental health isn't another do nothing day or a little treat sometimes what's good for you is putting in some of the work. Not all of it at once but sometimes you have to finish that essay or at least take the next step or you have to clean your room or at least dust the shelves or you gotta do the laundry or at least put it all in the hamper and it's not fun and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks but you have to because i read a post on the internet that told me that's what being nice to yourself is sometimes

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I love you PBS I love you NPR I love you public libraries I love you wikipedia I love you project gutenberg I love you librivox I love you libby I love you hoopla I love you openlibrary I love you internet archive I love you resources that make information free and accessible to the public

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This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

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a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

come on

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...ok but...

What if Dark Link made outta Malice/Gloom that starts as a way for Ganondorf to fuck with Hyrule/Link...

Only for him to build a personhood the longer he's left in a human shape?

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SAY NICE THINGS TO PPL

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You want to call your House rep now and tell them Trump needs to be impeached immediately for defying a Supreme Court order (re: Kilmar Abrego Garcia), which functionally voids our constitution and means no one in America has rights anymore.

I am not exaggerating.

As of now, anybody can be disappeared, no due process, no recourse. Trump is openly disregarding a Supreme Court order and says he’ll send US citizens to El Salvador.

This is not a drill.

Call your House rep and tell them they must impeach. Tell them if they cannot bring themselves to impeach, they must resign. A more open and shut case to impeach is not possible. Trump and his administration are saying openly, in public, that anybody can be kidnapped by ICE, even in error, and disappeared permanently.

Call your senators, too, and tell them to support impeachment (it goes to them once it passes a majority House vote).

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Its come to my attention that a lot of people do not know how to deal with a hot car in summer. A lot of people will get back to their car, after hours of it being parked in the full sun, and will open the door to be blasted in the face with furnace-level temperatures, and you'll just clamber in and shut the doors and leave the windows closed and you'll start driving that thing, and you'll wait for the air-conditioning to battle and overcome the heat.

Thats. Insane to me.

The inside of a car can get up to 40°C/104°F hotter than the outside temperature. Why would anyone get inside that????? It's gonna take your air-conditioning at least half an hour to combat that and bring the temperature down to something even remotely reasonable, and in the meantime you're sitting there risking heatstroke.

Now, I understand that it's currently winter in the northern hemisphere, which is where most of this site lives, but a) I'm in the southern hemisphere and today was Lots Of Degrees, and b) y'all should read this now and commit it to memory or queue it to reblog in summer or whatever, because it boggles my mind that some of you get into a car whose interior is literally oven-hot.

So!!!! Some tips!!!!!

Get a sun visor. One of the big ones that goes inside your windshield. You will not believe how much cooler those things keep your car. Get one, use it. Leave it to bounce around in your back-seat on cooler days, but have it on hand for the stinkers. They range in price but two-dollar stores usually have them for pretty cheap.

Leave the windows of your car cracked open. It doesn't have to be much. Literally just the tiniest amount will mean that the heat building inside your car has a way to escape, meaning the interior temp will naturally be kept lower. The larger the opening, the better, but depending on the neighbourhood you're parking in, maybe it would be better to have them open just a sliver. Even the tiniest crack will help. Ever tried warming up an oven with the door open? It doesn't work well. This is the same concept. If there is a way for the hot air to escape, the inside of your car will stay a lot cooler than it otherwise would have.

If you're fancy enough to have an openable sunroof (that's the dream) then leave that open a bit as well.

Youve just gotten back to your car and opened the door, and its hot as fuck in there. Open another door, ideally on the other side of the car, and let the hot air escape. If you can open all four doors and the boot, then thats even better. A bunch of the hot air will flush out. Not all!!! But a lot. Give it anywhere from a few moments to a few minutes, depending on how much of a hurry you're in.

Get in, start the car, open all the windows. Yes, even if you hate having the windows open.

Put the air-conditioning on full blast, and make sure the recycle is turned OFF. This means it pulls fresh air from outside the car (hot, but less hot than inside) and pumps that into the car, further displacing the heat inside the vehicle.

Start driving, still with the windows down. Once you get up enough speed, the force of the air from outside coming in will blast the rest of the excess heat out of the car.

The temp inside the car will now be roughly equivalent to the temp outside the car. Still hot!!!! But MAJORLY less so, and majority more handle-able by your air-conditioner.

Put all your windows up, and switch the air-con over to recycle. This means it takes the air in the car and cools it, then spits it back into the car, meaning that with each cycle, the air gets progressively cooler a lot faster.

If you do this, your car will be a hell of a lot more comfortable a hell of a lot sooner than it would be if you got into a 60°C/140°F cabin and just.... endured that, until your aircon could overcome it.

This post has been brought to you by an Australian who knows not one but TWO people who get into 60°C cars and wait 15 to 30 minutes for their car to drop back down to a temperature that's even REMOTELY tolerable.

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People reblogging, liking or commenting on any of my writing thoughts or spews is just

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I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

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General PSA's for begginer alt crafting

- superglue heats up when in contact with fiber, your craft can start smoking or even catch on fire

- you can wash clothing painted with acrylic paint in the washing machine if you turn it inside out and use the lowest temperature

- don't put painted clothes in the dryer.

- you can wash clothes with metal bits in the washing machine but use the handwashing setting, dry the metal bits with a paper towel before hanging them to dry, and know that it WILL be loud

- synthetic dye is needed to dye synthetic fibers and requires a long time simmering in a boiling pot. This WILL stink up the house and you NEVER want to make food in that pot again

- faux leather is vinyl not leather. Get vinyl paint to paint on it

- don't use your teeth as tools, they don't regenerate. Reconstructing enamel costs a small fortune (ask me how I know.)

- when handsewing a lot through thick fabric get thin needles, it will require less force and be less taxing on your wrists. When machine sewing get a higher grade needle (~130 for jean)

- embroidery floss is overpriced and not as strong as it looks. For sewing on heavy stuff get denim thread, it will last forever

- don't feed a 60$ home sewing machine ten layers of denim before you learn how much a servicing fee costs, these things are dellicate

- spray paint is best applied from 30-40cm away, in swift movements. Putting too much or applying from too close will cause drips. You can sand them down and apply a new layer of paint AFTER they dry. Wipe the can nozzle after painting if it's messy, you don't want it to clog and become unusable

- water based markers on fabric will bleed, if not instantly then with time, alcohol markers will fade with time

- most fabric glues are machine washable up to a certain temperature. modgepodge is not waterproof, hitack is handwash only. Check the instructions

- the flatter the surface the easier hot glue will peel off. Faux leather stands no chance, fibers like yarn will hold it best, but is impossible to remove the glue from them in the future

- rivets are a thing that exists, only require a hammer to install and can be used as permanent fabric attachment

- studs, gromets and other metal junk at small fabric stores are laughably overspriced

- acetone (found in nail polish remover) will remove acrylic stains out of furniture, flooring and faux leather, if used in excess can damage the laquer. Can also be used to remove prints and glue off of plastic (do a small test before commiting, might melt the plastic it it's grade is low)

- residue from stickers (and k-tape) can be removed with oil

- acrylic stains cannot be removed out of clothing or carpet so protect your area before painting and don't wear clothes you care about

- if your thread keeps getting tangled or snagging while handsewing try waxing it

- you can lock in screw-in spikes with screw lock glue if you're scared of them falling off because they unscrew

- you can add washers to screw-in spikes if you're scared of them falling through flimsy fabric or too big of a hole

- if you're making anything out of soda cans have a metal file on hand, they are deceptively sharp and will hurt you and rip through fabric you're installing them in

- bleach can be found in mold killing spray (don't touch that shit with bare hands. chemical burn.)

- fabric paints are no different from slightly dilluted acrylic. You can make it yourself by adding a bit of fabric softener to acrylic or honestly even water

- if you are setting anything with an iron use parchment paper or a pressing cloth to pervent your stuff from sticking to your iron and ruining it

- if you want a safety pin somewhere permanently pinch it shut with pliers

- as much as you can, avoid putting glue on clothing, it makes it really hard to change your decisions later on and upcycle the project in the future

- kiss your friends

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